Megan Brandow-Faller, Georgetown University – Child Creativity from Secessionist Vienna to Postwar America

How creative are children?

Megan Brandow-Faller, professor of history at the City University of New York Kingsborough, examines one figure from history who has an answer.

Megan Brandow-Faller is Professor of History at the City University of New York  Kingsborough and also teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and the 92^nd Street Y. Her research focuses on art and design in Secessionist and interwar Vienna, including children’s art and artistic toys of the Vienna Secession; expressionist ceramics of the Wiener Werkstätte; folk art and modernism; and women’s art education. She is the editor of Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-present (Bloomsbury 2018) and the author of The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy (Penn State University Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Laura Morowitz) of Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art Architecture and Design (Routledge, 2022). Brandow-Faller contributed two catalogue essays for the retrospective exhibition Die Frauen der Wiener Werkstätte at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (2021). Her newest project, Child Creativity in the Visual Arts from Secessionist Vienna to Postwar Vienna (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) focuses on the dissemination and popularization of Secessionist ideas of child creativity in postwar America.

Child Creativity from Secessionist Vienna to Postwar America

From the ‘creative corners’ found in postwar suburban ranch homes to the proliferation of children’s art exhibitions in schools and libraries, Secessionist Vienna’s cult of child creativity burned brightly in postwar America. That all children are inherently creative with unique access to imaginative powers remains ubiquitous today. The primary visionary responsible for popularizing the cult of child creativity in postwar America was Viennese Jewish émigré Viktor Löwenfeld, a pioneering figure in art education renowned for his work with the blind, the differently-abled and African-Americans.

With a leftist political agenda, the cold warrior Lowenfeld linked children’s artistic practice to larger socio-political concerns like racism, inclusivity and tolerance, an agenda corresponding to his gravitation—as a Jewish refugee in Jim Crow America— towards the oppressed and the marginalized. In Lowenfeld’s analysis, cut-outs and patterns could become instruments of totalitarian thinking in quashing individual expression. Lowenfeld’s famous polemics against coloring books condemned their devastating effects on children’s creativity; while children might derive a temporary satisfaction from filling in the outlines, such mindless busywork robbed children of the self-confidence to produce their own images while depriving of psychological release. What Lowenfeld called for shortly before his death in 1960 was nothing less than a new sort of ‘creative intelligence’ that could not be measured by standardized tests, grades, or worksheets but would result in well-rounded democratic citizens equipped to heal the racial and social issues facing a fragmented postwar America, an agenda relevant now more than ever.